


we're inconsolable.

by hasitsclaws



Series: we're inconsolable. [12]
Category: From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series
Genre: Adult Content, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 00:20:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1622228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hasitsclaws/pseuds/hasitsclaws
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She's listening to a song through her headphones and it sounds like death.</p><p>part twelve of the 'we're inconsolable' drabble series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we're inconsolable.

It's been 47 days since his wife and his brother brought him back from the golden room where everyone finally gets what they want.

In reality, no one ever gets what they want.

Kate's listening to some song through her iPod, the volume turned up so loud he can hear it through the headphones jammed into her ears.

She's got her feet on the dashboard and is petting the dog's head, mangy beast hanging it against the console between them.

Seth thinks there's something different about her, but he can't put a finger on it. He knows she's keeping secrets, has a guess at what they are, but he won't ask her about it. If there's one thing he's learned about Kate over the years, it's that you have to wait for her to talk to you first.

They flooded out a nest near the edge of the Amazons-- the rain forest, not the shipping website-- and one of the vamps gave herself up before Kate could drive a stake into her heart.

"You're our _saviors_ ," the vamp said, looking between Seth and Kate with big, venomous eyes. "You and your brother and her. What you're going to do because of the deal she's made--"

Kate cut the vamp's head off and Seth flinched when its blood sprayed over his face.

She's listening to a song through her headphones and it sounds like death.

They meet up with Tico near the edge of Mexico to do recon on where Santanico is, how many people she's turned into blood-thirsty murderers in the past two months.

"The more we kill, the more she makes," Tico says. "I was talking to Dusty the other night, and he said that at least fifteen hunters were killed in an ambush a few weeks ago. The vamps burned the place to the ground."

Seth shivers. "Why wouldn't they just drain them?" he asks after a moment.

Tico blinks, looks at him with a sad, hopeless kind of expression. "They burned the place and carved your name into the ashes, Seth. Kate's name, too. Richie's. Santanico's. The Nine Lords'."

At Seth's side, Kate shifts, vampire blood still staining her t-shirt.

He rips out her headphones as they drive away and begs her to talk to him, learned notions be damned.

"It was the only way," she says after she explains, tears making red tracks down her cheeks. "It was the _only_ way, Seth."

He feels betrayed, not because of what she's done, but because of who she went to to do it.

He starts training for it a day later, his back all healed up even though the nerves are still singing from their fight near the Amazons.

He throws knives and he shoots guns and he schools himself to be cool. "You, be cool," he says to himself in the mirror like that dead shop keep so long ago, like _him_ so long ago. "Be cool, Seth."

He dreams about the night his father burned, Richie pulling him out of the fire.

Of course he never asked why Richie started it; he didn't have to.

 

He hasn't visited their father's grave in years.

"Can a knife kill a God?" Kate asks one night, music blaring from her headphones.

They haven't touched each other in two weeks.

"Richie's can," Seth answers. "It's why Santanico gave it to him."

She tells him about how Sex Machine tried to sacrifice her that night, so long ago, about how it was all wrong because the Mayans sacrificed boys, not virgin girls.

He wants to say that maybe they sacrificed warriors, that it makes sense because she has a warrior's heart.

"I love you."

She says it for the first time, full-out, when they're sitting together in an empty lot sharing a cigarette, of all times to say it.

"I love you and love means watching someone die," she says. "I don't want to watch you die, Seth."

He smiles. "I think you sentenced yourself to that when you made the deal with my brother, Princess."

As she cries in her sleep that night, he curls himself around her until she sobs it all out into his chest.

They haven't touched in three weeks, but holding her now feels like coming home.

Richie finds them south of Mexico City, smiles like a snake on its last leg. Santanico is with him, wavering in the background, looking fierce and beautiful.

"Have you finally got your balls on, brother?" Richie asks.

Kate touches Seth's arm, the flames and scars underneath Richie's sweat jacket he can't seem to take off these days, and the eldest Gecko brother sighs. "I guess," he says. "But this better just be Temple of Doom. At Crystal Skull, I'm out."

Richie rolls his eyes, an almost human smile quirking his lips. "Same old Seth," he says, and for once in a very long time, Seth feels like he's actually looking at his brother (his scared and brave and loyal little _brother_ ) again.

Kate steels her nerves and calls Freddie.

There's a very pregnant pause on the other line before the Ranger says, "Fuck, whatever; let's get it-- I'm in."

Tara and Tico and Miguel and Florence and Adam and Dusty and Nadir and another pack of hunters from Arizona named Marie, Sasha, Chen and Rufus all phone-in the following day like a conference call, like they're making bids for stock in a high-end corporation.

"If the Gods are going down, I wanna see it," Florence says.

"Me too," chime the others.

Seth shakes his head. "We're working with the enemy to do this."

"That's always the way the world ends," says Rufus, deep voice crackling over the line.

"The good and the bad fighting on a battlefield of blood," Marie giggles, and Seth thinks the little hunting group signed up for this because they're kind of crazy, or something.

"We're coming with," Tara says.

Seth looks at Kate, and the girl simply smiles.

They fuck for the last time on the dirty floor of their motel room that looks a lot like the ones at the Dew Drop Inn with the noontime light coming through the windows.

Kate touches his face like he needs to be taken care of, like he's fragile. She moves desperately in his lap, eyes finding eyes and they're crying, the both of them crying there on the floor and it should be from laughter, not all this poison between them. They murmur words of love to each other, of forgiveness and sweet nothings because despite battling all of these monsters, pulling each other out of burning buildings, smashing glass and bloody knuckles and wiping mud off their boots, they know that neither one of them can ever come through.

And it hurts, it hurts so fucking much but they're just doing it to themselves because they've made a place inside each other even though they shouldn't have.

They wait for the hunters and Santanico outside the ruins of the Titty Twister, a place Seth had vowed never to come back to but here he is. He can feel Kate shaking next to him, listens to the hitch in her breath as the light of the late noon sparkles off the dinged out neon sign.

_Open Dusk Till Dawn!_

He hears Sargent Frost in his head, pictures the dog talking to him even though the mutt's just sitting on the ground, wagging his tail. " _You never come back from a place like that._ "

 

Twenty minutes later, when the sun is starting to sink, dozens of cars roll up. Hunters from across the world spill out, Freddie at the head of them with their friends lingering behind. 

"Turns out ending the world somehow gets you back on some peoples' good side," the Ranger says, sarcastic smile on his lips. "Plus Rufus and his gang have connections. They all think that killing the Lords will break the curse. Kill all the vamps, too."

"Seriously?" Kate asks, brow raised.

Tara steps forwards and grins behind her scarred face. "It's worth a shot."

"What are we working with?" Seth asks then, glancing around at different faces, yet somehow they're all the same.

"We've got thirty-five," Adam says, lighting a cigarette, probably his last. "How many does Santanico have?"

"Hundreds," comes the voice of the Demigoddess from the now open doors of the strip bar; she steps out and the neon flickers on, flames swirling, painting her body in shadows and fire.

Richie struts out just behind her-- he's wearing his glasses again, the bible salesman suit.

"They're gonna eat us alive!" calls a hunter from the back of the group suddenly, voice panicked.

Santanico simply laughs. "Don't worry, _cazadores_. I only brought the best," she says. "They won't bite... Unless you ask them to."

"Do you think my dad's down there, in the Underworld, I mean? And Scott?" Kate asks as they dawn their best armor-- weapons and ribbons and blood. 

The bar's been cleaned up. There is no carnage anywhere, and the floorboards are pried open in places to lead them down into darkness, into death.

Seth shrugs. "I hope not, because that means _my_ old man's down there, too. Probably."

Kate takes his hand. "Whatever _is_ down there, we'll face it together," she says.

"Together," Seth answers, just as Richie steps up beside them, grinning like a little kid in a candy shop. "I guess I always knew it'd come to this."

 **  
**They enter the tombs that lead down, down, down to a world beyond with their heads held high, and he finally understands what Tara meant about not making a graveyard out of a bone-white afternoon, about how the light flickers through the windowpanes and it means they're inconsolable.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I wanted to mention very quickly that this isn't the last drabble in the series; I have (I am pretty sure) three more planned until it's finished. But man am I crying at the thought of letting this series go. It's only been a few weeks since I started it, but I'm so attached. And with the season (series?) finale next week, I'm a wreck.


End file.
